The Hardest Deal of All: The Battle Over School Integration in Mississippi, 1870â?"1980

CHAPTER THREE: TEN YEARS OF NOTHING BUT DELIBERATE SPEED: The Aftermath of Brown in Mississippi

61 TEN YEARS OF NOTHING BUT DELIBERATE SPEED The Aftermath of Brown in Mississippi On the morning of July 30, 1954, between eighty-five and one hundred black leaders sat down with Governor Hugh White and his all-white Legal Education Advisory Committee (LEAC) to discuss the fate of school segregation in the wake of the momentous Brown v. Board of Education decision.1 The origins of the meeting stemmed from Governor White’s continuing effort to secure support for his as-yet unfunded school equalization within segregation program. After the Brown decision, a number of white leaders continued to champion White’s 1953 equalization plan,but all agreed that before the state moved to expend large sums of money to improve black schools, they needed firm assurance from blacks that they favored the status quo of segregated schools. Governor White moved to gauge black opinion in the state on this subject by holding a meeting in late June 1954 with two confirmed black supporters of the equalization drive, Jackson (Miss.) Advocate editor Percy Greene and Baptist minister and leader of the General Baptist State Convention , H. H. Humes, as well as six prominent black educators in the state: college presidents J. H. White, Jacob Reddix, and J. R. Otis; and three teachers , J. D. Boyd, N. R. Burger, and E. S. Bishop, all former presidents of the MTA. Governor White told the black group and a handful of white officials CHAPTER THREE present that “he recognized the Negro citizens of Mississippi and their needs” and urged them to support his equalization within segregation program , which would necessarily include a disavowal of any desire to press for integrated schools. Although the black leaders did not explicitly renounce Brown, they did not suggest that the decision would necessarily undermine segregation either. They implied that a school system “that will satisfy both black and white without circumventing Brown” could be developed. The black leaders talked about local meetings of “responsible”blacks and whites to set up satisfactory school systems. With segregation no longer the law and with a “true program of equalization of schools” established, all-black schools in the state would be no more segregated than the all-black schools in the North or the West. For black educators who had witnessed the state’s bumbling equalization efforts of the past decade, their most important demand was for assurances that blacks would have a voice in the planned equalization program. Of course, for the white officials listening to these proposals, nothing less than the maintenance of strictly segregated schools would be satisfactory, and while none of the black leaders shared white hatred for the May Supreme Court decision, they cautiously avoided any indication that they had an interest in pressing for Jim Crow’s immediate demise. So both the white officials and the black leaders at the meeting essentially heard what they wanted to hear from the other side about how to organize schools in the post-Brown era. The meeting adjourned with an agreement to organize a larger conclave of black leaders the following month to discuss these matters further. Although Governor White and other state officials tried to ensure that the selection of the larger group of black leaders scheduled to meet in Jackson would merely be an expansion of the group of eight, white leaders ultimately decided to invite individuals who represented the range of black opinion in the state in the hopes of giving the meeting real legitimacy. Ultimately , at least one-fourth of those invited to attend the meeting were educators in the state’s woefully inadequate black school system, people perceived as the best potential backers of the equalization within segregation program . Over half of the delegates hailed from the Mississippi Delta; school integration would mean black-majority schools in that area, and white officials were especially anxious to get a pledge of voluntary commitment to segregation from black leaders there. The group of eight suggested many of 62 TEN YEARS OF NOTHING BUT DELIBERATE SPEED the invitees, and while the governor did not always know the opinions of these individuals on the issues at hand, he had to invite people whom he clearly knew opposed the equalization scheme and favored the beginning of school integration, such as Dr. E. J. Stringer, head of the state NAACP, and Dr. T. R. M. Howard, head of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership (RCNL).3...